Like their other titles, The Secret Lives of Animalsis colorful, easy to use, and appealing from start to finish. Animals are helpfully grouped by category, and each gets its moment in the sun, with illustrations, details and little-known facts.

Kids who are curious about animals will learn a lot about their favorites, as well as some creatures they’ve never heard of. Those who want to get outside to experience animals directly will find plenty of ideas. There is also terrific general science information to help explain concepts like migrations, taxonomies, the continental shelf, anadromous fish (I had never heard that term either), metamorphosis, keystone species, and how to tell a horn from an antler.

Inspired by the book, my family and I returned to some of our favorite activities, like crabbing, tidepooling, and making a bird feeder to attract and feed and local birds. We also took a walk to identify squirrel nests, looked at a spider web with a magnifying glass, and listened for animal sounds at night.

In addition, we learned a lot of fun facts about our animal friends and devised a quiz based on the tidbits in the book. See how well you do! (answers below.)

Secret Lives of Animals Unofficial Quiz

How do prairie dogs help their local grass?

Are caribou and reindeer the same species?

Do sockeye salmon change color after they spawn?

What are baby mice sometimes called?

Which animal dates back more than 300 million years and had a wingspan of up to 2 feet?

Can you tell how old a rattlesnake is by counting the number of rattles?

The Giant Pacific species of what animal weighs more than 600 pounds?

How many species of fly are there?

Can a sponge grow to be bigger than a human?

What animal did Benjamin Franklin propose as America’s national bird, rather than the Bald Eagle?

Quiz Answers

They keep it trimmed.

Yes.

Yes.

Pinkies.

Dragonfly.

No.

Giant Octopus.

150,000.

Yes.

Turkey.

If you enjoyed playing along, you will enjoy The Secret Lives of Animals! I have one copy to give away. To enter, leave a comment below, listing either your favorite animal or one you want to learn more about. I’ll choose a winner using a random generator by Midnight, PST, Weds, Nov. 4. The winner will be notified by email.

How much do you know about nature? Fans of Stacy Tornio and Ken Keffer’s wonderful Kids’ Outdoor Adventure Book: 448 Great Things To Do In Nature Before You Grow Up, reviewed here last year, will be thrilled that the pair has returned with another charming and informative book that illuminates nature, The Truth About Nature: A Family’s Guide to 144 Common Myths about the Great Outdoors. Like their first book, this one also contains extremely charming illustrations by Rachel Riordan.

So, how much do you know about nature? This book will challenge your assumptions, as well as commonly held superstitions, in a fun way, using a “myth scale” that is easy to understand. Did you think that rabbits love carrots, tornadoes spin clockwise, only male animals grow antlers, and you lose most of your body heat through your head? Me, too! These are all myths, to varying degrees. Learning about these cleverly chosen myths is not only fascinating; some of Keffer and Tornio’s myth busting promotes health, such as the knowledge that you can indeed get a sunburn on a cloudy day, dogs’ mouths aren’t really cleaner than ours, and clear water isn’t always safe to drink.

The Truth About Nature also contains wonderful hands-on activities and experiments, like making slime or creating a cloud in a jar, so kids can experience some of nature’s wonders for themselves. Learning about myths, cleverly divided by season, one can’t help but become more engaged with and curious about nature. Like many of the best nature books, this one will have readers looking and listening a little more carefully outdoors, perhaps on a hunt for a mushroom fairy ring, a rare songless bird, a river that seems to flow upstream, or, yes, a female animal with antlers.

The authors are also running a cool contest:

Win a School Visit and free copies of The Truth About Nature. Enter a video or photo that features a common outdoor myth between September 22 and November 23, 2014.

We didn’t initially intend to hike five miles from our house to Muir Woods National Monument and back, but the first day of spring arrived quite beautifully and, inspired by the new book, We Love Nature! A Keepsake Journal for Families Who Love to Explore the Outdoors, by Stacy Tornio and Ken Keffer (illustrated by Denise Holmes), my daughter and I set off on a pretty and hilly local trail. We loved the idea of welcoming the season with a hike, as well as the notion of leaving right from our house and walking to the trail head. We thought we’d walk one way, and had arranged for a pick-up at the end of the walk.

Keffer and Tornio are the authors of The Kids’ Outdoor Adventure Book, reviewed here last year, and their new book, which delightfully arrived in time for spring, expands nicely on their theme of providing easy ideas that families and others can use to create their own nature adventures. The book serves as a journal, as well, with questions that prompt readers to think, write and draw about their nature time.

Our first-choice activity from the book? “Hike on a trail near your home and write about what you discover.” We added some photos as well.

Anna and me, setting off on our adventure.

Pride of Madeira plants were sighted while climbing our first hill out of our neighborhood.

A kind and creative homeowner shows the way to the Dipsea Trail, a trail that winds seven miles from a canyon in our town of Mill Valley, CA, to the sea at Stinson Beach. We will take the Dipsea partway.

We made it to the Muir Woods, about 2.5 miles from the start, feeling pretty accomplished.

Muir Woods has lovely creeks running through it that are home to spawning salmon.

Muir Woods is also home to thousands of old-growth coast redwoods, the tallest living things in the world. This redwood fell on Winter Solstice, 2012. A sign nearby told us that it was an elder that had had a good life and deserved respect.

Tired, but also reenergized from being in the beautiful woods, we traced our steps back toward home.

The hikers, five hours and a great adventure later.

Prompted by the book, and this hike, we immediately planned our next one! A few days later, we took the Dipsea Trail in the opposite direction than we had the first time and went into our town for a shorter (but stair-filled) loop walk. Later, we plan to keep going on the Dipsea Trail, past the Muir Woods to the ocean (and take someone up on that ride home).

Some other adventures we are eager to try from We Love Nature! A Keepsake Journal for Families Who Love to Explore the Outdoors this spring and summer include:

Design your yard and garden to be butterfly friendly.

Experiment with starting seeds.

Reuse an object as a garden container.

Find inspiration from nature, and then create a piece of art.

Swim with your family or friends at a local lake, river or pond.

Discover the night sky through stargazing.

Can’t wait!

Would you like to win your own copy of We Love Nature! A Keepsake Journal for Families Who Love to Explore the Outdoors and a pair of KEEN shoes? Enter the Destination Nature giveaway today.

If you are age 6-12 and you have an original idea for a backyard game, you could win a $10,ooo scholarship, or enter a game as a group and win a $15,000 donation to the non-profit of your choice. Now in its third year, the CLIF Kid Backyard Game of the Year Contest fosters creativity and outdoor play by encouraging innovative games that don’t require any special equipment, but rather sports and other items one would typically have around the house.

One of last year’s winning games, North Pole South Pole (pictured above), encourages players to be “persistent penguins” who gather fish from a fishing hole before depositing them at their North or South Pole. The equipment? Hula hoops, pillowcases and water balloons. Download instructions for North Pole South Pole and other winning games.

The entry deadline is June 17. The finalists will receive a trip to San Diego for the July 27 Backyard Game playoffs. Download a complete set of rules.

As a bonus, the 2013 judges include Stacy Tornio and Ken Keffer, co-authors of the fantastic Kids Outdoor Adventure Book, which I reviewed on this blog, and which also encourages outdoor play and discovery throughout the year.

So, what are you waiting for? Put your thinking cap on and get ready to innovate and play.

“Nature is a destination,” write Stacy Tornio and Ken Keffer, the authors of The Kids Outdoor Adventure Book: 448 Things to Do in Nature Before You Grow Up. “But you don’t have to travel anywhere to find it. Just open the door and step outside.” That idea of fun and adventure in “nearby nature” infuses their entire delightful new book. This is an especially important concept at a time when kids are spending much more time with electronics than they are in the natural world. The Kids Outdoor Adventure Book offers a perfect counter-balance to indoor time, with activities that are easy for even the busiest families to enjoy.

The book is wonderfully, and helpfully, arranged by seasons (each of which is declared “the best season”.) Each season features an array of fun outdoor activities, so that a reader might be inspired to tap a maple tree or find a turtle in spring, catch a firefly or find fossils in summer, go owling or conquer a corn maze in fall, or go ice fishing or whittle a branch in winter. In addition to all the activities, which are presented in a fun check-list fashion and have guidelines as to the “adventure scale” of each one, there are plenty of larger-scale projects, outdoor games, destinations, and foods to make, so that families and others can be kept very busy doing the book’s activities over many years.

The Kids Outdoor Adventure Book is very rich. It features a range of activities, from those that are simple to do, but might have escaped notice, such as “Roll down a hill like a log” (something my daughter loved to do) to more exotic ideas like “Go spelunking” in a cave. Rachel Riordan’s extremely cute illustrations complement the breadth of ideas in this jam-packed, fun-filled book. Tornio and Keffer, who are judges in the 3rd annual ClifKID Backyard Game of the Year Contest, have captured the joy of being alive and the rhythm of the seasons and the natural world. Readers of this book will surely be inspired to open the door to their own outdoor adventures.